There seems to be a presumption that private prisons are widespread. And while not rare, they are only 8% of prisons. There is widespread use of profit-seeking vendors like food suppliers or phone companies though.

I only bring this up because it seems like the mental model most people have is that 50--90% of prisons are private - mainly because it gets discussed so much. But the problems with prisons by-and-large involve government administration, not for-profit companies running the amok (despite that also happening in a much smaller number of cases).

8% is 8% too much. They’re also currently housing 90% of detained immigrants. [1]

[1] https://truthout.org/articles/immigration-detention-has-beco...

>private prisons

Are a red herring to distract from the real issue. The industrialist complex around prisons that do in fact profit from prisons. Like all gov contracts are also highly inefficient by design.

8%, or 1 in 12, prisons being private isn't that encouraging when blowing up the statistic to the scale of a country. That's still thousands of facilities with perverse incentives.

But yes, the ones really profiting are those making deals to service the prison. Those who bring food, or repair the infrastructure, or custodial duties. A lot of seemingly unrelated industries have every reason to lobby in the background to focus on "hard on crime".

> There is widespread use of profit-seeking vendors like food suppliers or phone companies though.

Yep. Everyone's heard about private prisons and their pet judges, but few know anything about Bob Barker or VitaPro. Their are deep and very murky waters here.

  However, currently only 8.5% of people who are incarcerated are held in private facilities.

  Despite the significant amount of economic and political power held by private prison corporations, it is imperative to understand that private prisons are not the only force at work in the Prison Industrial Complex.

  Exclusive focus on private prison corporations as the lynchpin of the PIC ignores and overlooks the variety of other players and systems at work.

  For example, there are thousands of companies and a wide range of contracts in both private and public prisons: it is a whole network of parties with vested interests.

  In Are Prisons Obsolete, Angela Davis explains that,
    “…even if private prison com­panies were prohibited – an unlikely prospect, indeed-the prison industrial complex and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively intact.
     Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but pub­lic prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corpora­tions that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect”
    (Davis, 2003, 99-100).